Thursday, December 17, 2009

Australia's first 3D feature movie has been announced. It's Bait, to be directed by Russell Mulcahy. The plot....

...will centre on a group of people trapped in a flooded underground supermarket with a pack of hungry tiger sharks after a tsunami.

Some examples of Russsel Mulcahy's previous ventures into fantasy and horror :

No matter how good Bait turns out to be, there will be at least one smart-arse critic who will snipe : "It needed a pig."

The first time I saw a special effects studio was when I visited Australia's then master special effects make-up artist Bob McCarron in the mid-1980s. The Razorback boar was right there in his garage, it was massive, and he gave me a demo of what it could do. It was a stunning, disturbingly lifelike creation. It could heave its huge head around, snap its jaws and blow snot, steam and drool. It had a wider range of facial expressions than Carlo Rimbaldi's ET puppet, then regarded as the most advanced creature effects in cinema. But you barely see what it can do in the Razorback movie. Damn shame.

In the days before CGI, you had to build these monsters. They cost a bomb, took months, or years to build and were rarely used the way the creature creators, like McCarron, Rick Baker and Rimbaldi, intended them to be seen, and worked.